Artfinder to Be the ‘Amazon’ of Art

If you want to buy books you go to Amazon, if you want to buy music you go to, well, any number of places, if you want to watch films you go to LoveFilm. Where do you go if you want to buy art?

Here’s one of those “Who would have guessed?” statistics. Who do you think is Europe’s biggest seller of art? The Louvre in Paris? The Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

No. It is Ikea. Which is fine if you want, well, Ikea-style art, but it is a bit limited.

A start-up, run by the man who was responsible for setting up Amazon’s electronics and toys division in the U.K. and was COO at Last.FM, aims to widen your choice to pretty well every museum in the world, while at the same time launching two other services aimed at the art world: the ability to produce bespoke apps for individual artists, and an art identification service using some impressive image recognition tools.

Never let it be said that Spencer Hyman, CEO of Artfinder and a veteran of the Web 1.0 scene (with the scars to prove it), lacks ambition. He sees Artfinder as at various times in our conversation, the IMDB for art, radio for art or Desert Island Discs for art.

But matching the ambition are some solid backers, including Reid Hoffman’s Greylock and Wellington Partners. Sherry Coutu will act as chairman of the company.

According to Mr. Hyman, about 10% of the population have an active interest in art and another 30% a passing interest. But they have two problems: they don’t know what they like, and even if they did, how would they get it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could take a photograph of a picture and use my phone to recognise it? That starts to solve one of the problems.

The other problem it starts to solve is … to do the recommendations. One of the keys to that is you have to be to build a profile of what people like and keep track of what they have been enjoying. So what this helps us do is do the equivalent. See a picture, you mark it, you edit your profile.

What the website does is to provide you with an IMDB for art. It enables you to take wonderful tours through art, see stuff by different artists, see stuff by similar artists, keep track of what you have been seeing, build a collection.

ArtFinder is building a catalogue of all of the world’s art—that ambition again. It has about 500,000 entries from a large number of the world’s most important collections. With that, and some seriously hard-core technology, they have built an impressively fast image recognition tool that allows a user to take a picture with their smartphone, upload it to the site and immediately get back details about that piece of art.

The business model is pretty straightforward, says Mr. Hyman. It is two-fold. Sell art to enthusiasts, and sell enthusiasts to artists.

I think there is a massive pent-up demand for people who want to know how to fill up for their walls with the right stuff. They just don’t know how to do this at the moment. They have no way of searching. If I like this picture what else will I like?

Some 60 million Americans purchase art every year. 6.1 million people in the UK likewise. There are more people who visit museums by a factor of 5 to 10 than go to football matches.

What Mr. Hyman aims to offer is a platform for the world’s museums to sell posters, prints and lithographs. They won’t sell art themselves, but rather will be a platform, providing a common basket so a user could buy a print from say, the MoMA in New York, a poster from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and a lithograph from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Artfinder will take a cut of the sale.

The second string is a slef-publishing tool for artists to produce their own apps to allow them to display their works. Using HTML5 and a template engine an artist can self-build their own app and publish it. Apps for the iPad will have to go through the Apple approval process, but tablets powered by Android can be published straight away.

Either Artfinder will charge a fee to the artist for producing the app, or they will take a revenue share.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the third part of the start ups offer is an image rights search. Users take a picture of the piece of art, upload it and the details of the rights holder are immediately returned allowing licensing deals to be struck.

Artfinder is an ambitious project to bring order to a world that has thrived on disorder. Business and art don’t often go together well, but by concentrating on the popular art market, rather than high end, Mr. Hyman has identified a sector that melds social media and commerce.

There are significant obstacles in the way, some technical, some cultural, but Mr. Hyman has backers with deep pockets. Let’s hope they don’t have short arms.

Add a Comment

About Tech Europe

Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.